The General Assembly has stressed, including in its most recent resolutions 63/150, 64/131 and 65/186, the importance of improving disability data and statistics, in compliance with national legislation. This is recommended in order to better compare data at the national and global level for purposes of policy design, planning and evaluation from the disability perspective. The General Assembly has also urged Governments to cooperate and to avail themselves of the technical assistance of the Statistics Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the Secretariat.

In this regard, Assembly resolution 63/150 requests the Secretary-General to give higher priority to the concerns of, and issues related to, persons with disabilities, as well as their inclusion within the work programme of the United Nations system in order to ensure that the 2010 World Programme on Population and Housing Censuses is inclusive of the perspective of persons with disabilities.

In its resolution 64/131, the Assembly calls on Governments to build a knowledge base of data and information about the situation of persons with disabilities, which could be used to facilitate disability-sensitive development policy planning, monitoring, evaluation and implementation. Particular attention is paid to the realization of the Millennium Development Goals for persons with disabilities, and in this regard the Assembly:

(b) Encourages Member States to make use of statistics, to the extent possible, to integrate a disability perspective in reviewing their progress towards realizing the Millennium Development Goals for all.

With this in mind, this page has been created to provide information on resources available on disability data and statistics.

Statistics on the employment situation of people with disabilities: A Compendium of national methodologies, Working Paper No. 40, ILO Bureau of Statistics in collaboration with the InFocus Programme on Skills, Knowledge and Employability Policy Integration Department Bureau of Statistics, International Labour Office, Geneva, April 2004